friday august 14

today i left my house at around 7:50am, intent on putting a few items - including about 10 empty beer cans that i'd put in a separate bag - into our recycling bin before it was emptied later in the day. as i reached the sidewalk, i noticed that the kid i'd met yesterday was just one house over, sifting through my neighbour's recycling bin.

as previously noted, i would've preferred for the usual neighbourhood collectors to end up with my empties, but i recognized there was no avoiding the kid this time, so when he excitedly asked, "do you have some?" i said yes and handed him the bag.

as i put the rest of my recycling into the bin, he said "headed to work, huh?" despite the fact that i was wearing a t-shirt, athletic shorts, and my ridiculous adidas headband, with my tennis racquet jutting out of my bag. i dunno about this kid, man.

thursday august 13

today i was bringing our recycling and compost bins to the curb when a kid - maybe 12 years old? - stopped his bike about 10 feet away from me. we proceeded to have the following conversation:

him: "can i ask you a question?"

me: "uh, sure."

him: "do you drink beer?"

me (immediately assuming he's going to ask me to buy him beer and looking for the best way to shut down this conversation): "no, not really."

as it turned out, he was simply interested in collecting empties. after he wheedled it out of me that i do, in fact, drink beer, i agreed to leave my cans outside for him rather than throwing them all in the recycling bin at the end of the week. to be honest though, i'm still rooting for the veteran neighbourhood collectors to beat him to the punch.

saturday august 8

today i woke up to find more than 30 emails in my inbox, a significant increase over the three or four i might typically receive overnight. while the first two of the 30+ messages were standard stuff, the rest - all of which had arrived in the last half-hour and which continued to stream in as i blearily tried to figure out what was going on - were along these lines:

after a few minutes, i realized that - for some reason - an old work-related email address, which still forwarded messages to my primary personal email account, had been used by someone named "asa" to sign up for interracialcupid.com, latinamericancupid.com, and militarycupid.com, all of which are apparently real sites dating sites.

since i never trust the "unsubscribe" button on emails from sites i'm not familiar with, i spent several touch-and-go minutes trying to log into the old work email account (obviously i'd forgotten the password) and was eventually able to get in, change the password, and turn off the forwarding option. it was a relief to stop the emails, but i wish asa all the best in his/her/their search for love.